You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals – and even heads of state – they all say: ‘Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.’
And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
Intellectuals would be much more accepted now than in the ’40s.
Wasn’t the Treaty of Versailles, wasn’t that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pro-Holocaust.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
The left-wing thinkers and intellectuals have been more misogynist with me than the army. They can’t accept that a young woman is able to think, and they underestimate the intellectual work and study I might have done. They ask who is the man behind me.
There’s nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger’s den with a piece of raw meat in your hands.
Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became ‘pro’-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.’ s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.
I don’t like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don’t like condescending people.
Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.
France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they’re valued.
We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.
Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that.
Venezuelan interests are to be defended by Venezuela. The U.S. should defend the interests of the U.S. Where are the U.S. people, where are the intellectuals, who could put limits on their government?
In the 1920s, big names in the Arab world spoke of Scheherazade as an example for intellectuals fighting for their rights. She was a fighter for the right of free expression.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Some people spend their time reasoning and thinking out everything, and so anything that cannot be fully understood, they will not accept. We call these people ‘intellectuals.’
Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.
Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it’s stranger than non-fiction as well.
Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood – not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.
Everybody loves Vegas, and everybody puts it down, especially intellectuals and artists. We have to rub our feet on it, but we’re all secretly thrilled to be there.
In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.
Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals’ ideological riots sometimes kill millions.
There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.
Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
I don’t think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it’s something they can use. It’s not something they live.
The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.
There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
But the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals.
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution ‘to each according to his merit or value.’
All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it’s another world. It’s filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers – all kinds of people.
Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.
You had to do some club after school and it was either the sports or the intellectuals. And right smack in the middle was the acting thing for all the outcasts, which I fell into pretty easily.
Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.
There are not many intellectuals left of Harold Pinter’s stature who dare raise their voices – and with such force – against the menace of U.S. and the unrestricted use of its power. Pinter’s voice is an unceasing thunder.
Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.
Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.
I believe in the romantic interchange between intellectuals about fashion.
It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.
There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.
There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.
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